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Teaser ad for ‘Prey 2’ stars aliens on a plane

Last week, Bethesda Softworks released the first teaser trailer for Prey 2. The live-action video by Goodness Mfg is designed to look like “found footage” from an alien attack. It’s similar to what you’d expect from the genre since Blair Witch—shaky camera work, hard-to-understand visuals, and for those who didn’t play through Prey, probably a lot of confusion. If you can remember way back to the original Prey, this footage is from the plane that the main character sees crashing into the alien ship at the very beginning. The implication is that this is neither a prequel nor a sequel, but a concurrent story line. Your protagonist, which you wouldn’t know unless you were teased sufficiently to research it, is Killian Samuels, the prison guard in the trailer. It’s interesting how sci-fi advertising relies on fans to investigate cryptic messages and put the pieces together. Still, they learned their lesson about how far an audience can be teased. The original Prey started development in 1995 but wasn’t released until 2006. Prey 2 started development three years ago, but they were smart enough to wait to announce it. It should be on sale in 2012 after the standard year-long marketing lead-up. Hopefully, saving the ad’s juvenile cameraman and his bitchy girlfriend won’t become a side mission.